For Lorna

I had a good day at The Garage, supporting Beeston & District Civic Society where they and other local groups gathered to celebrate and promote the first of two Heritage Open Day weekends in and around Beeston (there are more events next weekend).

Whilst folding and handing out copies the Beeston Blue Plaque Guide as well as my Beeston map, I got to talk with lots of interesting people, including a lady called Lorna. This posting is for her.

I got into a conversation with Lorna about maps, especially local maps, and how they can help us see, and understand, the world a little differently. Lorna mentioned The Meadows in Nottingham, where she had done some work involving maps with students, which prompted me to remember our very first issue — hence the image below.

Why we asked for this photograph to be taken is explained in the Cover Story, which appeared on page 2 (click on the 2nd image to enlarge and read the text more clearly).

Looking now at what we wrote all those years ago we wouldn't change a word.

As I say, this is for Lorna, but if you enjoy and agree then I'm glad.

PS. I apologise if the text is small, but it is readable on my computer. If you would like a more legible copy of the text, please contact me. Robert.

Little Beeston things

Seen on a side entrance in the centre of Beeston. How can it not bring a smile to your face. 

For the past couple of weeks I have been peeling windfalls from our three apple trees. If I don't collect them up daily, they soon go over and the freezer compartment on our fridge is close to bursting with frozen cooked apples (and plums from a month ago). Walking around Beeston, I have lost count of the number of apple trees I have seen laden with unpicked fruit. In the end, because of maggots, I end up throwing away half the apples I peel, but the delicious taste of home-cooked apples makes the effort all worth while.

Last Saturday (10 October) marked a big change in my life. From the age of sixteen in 1960, I have always been doing something; holding down a voluntary post of some kind and organising events or campaigns of some kind. Last year I gave up committees and in the past couple of months I have attended two committees as an observer of sorts. Both occasions further convinced me that I made the right decision last year when I reached seventy.

Now, back to last Saturday, when I took the lead in organising a 'historyfest' at Nottingham Central Library on Angel Row in Nottingham City Centre. Click here to see a report on the Our Nottinghamshire website. I had already made up mind that it was going to be the last thing I will ever organise. From now on I will just be a helper, supporting friends and groups I like as and when I please. After fifty-six years of continuous voluntary activity I have had enough.

I began the summer being told I had 'established fibrosis of the lungs', which cannot be treated. After lots of tests and hospital visits it got a name: Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and I also learnt that, at some point, I will need open heart surgery because I have a dicky heart, but just to complicate things, the symptoms for both conditions are as good as identical.

Yet, despite, all this, I have had a great summer and feel, physically and mentally, better now than I have for a long time. I am doing what I have been told, avoiding crowds and I am about to abandon buses for the winter, since I am told my immune system is weak and just catching a cold or the flu can be life threatening. This kind of diagnosis is hard to take in, even less believe, but I have to believe it — I owe it to my family and those who love me.

Throughout my life I have been blessed in so many ways, even though to an outside observer, this may seem strange. Perhaps this winter I will finally begin writing a memoir of sorts for my grandchildren, if the maps and stories I want to write to do not get in the way.

Last Sunday morning I was out delivering for the Labour Party, walking up and down Beeston front paths, looking at the everyday, like those apple trees I mentioned earlier. It really was a pleasure and over the next two weeks I can look forward to a string of friends and family visiting, some staying, for a number of reasons. Life in my 'little Beeston' is never dull. The world really does come to me.

A PS...

Two of the local history groups which took part in the Historyfest  on 10 October were from Beeston and Toton:

Gill Morral and Carole White were wearing two hats - Friends of Toton Fields and Beeston & District LHS. Their display was very impressive and Gill has offered to take me on a personal guided tour of Toton. I hope to take her offer up before too long and, when I do, I will share my visit on this blog.

In 2012, Carrina Harrison and Graham Hopscroft came along on the day and were squeezed into corner. Then the Canalside Heritage Trust based at Beeston Lock was weeks old. Now they are a Lottery funded heritage project which may well be open this time next year and they had a very different story to tell at this year's fair. Before I got my diagnosis, they are a group I would have liked to help, but now I will cheer them on from the sidelines instead.

Nottingham council housing gets its own history with the publication of Homes and Places

I bought Homes and Places from the Five Leaves Bookshop stall at the Angel Row Historyfest on Saturday. It is a history of Nottingham council housing.

By chance I have a photograph of Matt on the Five Leaves Bookshop stall selling me Homes and Places, along with Ten Poems about Nottingham, which has also just been published.

Now, where was I? Ah yes. I have just finished reading Homes and Places and happen to know Chris Matthews and Dan Lucas, who were closely involved in writing and publishing the book. It is such a work of reference, that I will have to create myself an index and chronology. 

The book contains a full-colour map from 1932 showing the extent of Nottingham's council housing at the time and next Tuesday, by chance, I am hoping to see the map when I visit the Special Collections Library at Kings Meadow with the WEA Beeston mapping class I am a member of. I did not expect to have Homes and Places with me.

I look forward to reading extracts on the Municipal Dreams blog/website (which posted a contribution in May 2014 by City Councillor Alex Ball about the city's first council housing and is my favourite website). 

Also congratulations to Chris on the book's layout. I love the white space and a gutter which didn't break whilst I read the book (a real failing with many books today!).

Homes and Places has seven chapters which chart the history of council housing in Nottingham, beginning with 'The Old Problem' and ending with 'To Build Again 2005–2015'. From what knowledge I have of council housing (I was a regional and national supported housing officer with a housing association for twenty years) and from my twenty-two years working as Reviews Editor for Local History Magazine, I know a good local history when I read one and, I promise you, this is good!

I have led a few walks around Lenton looking at public and charitable housing and on my old Parkviews blog, I document several of Chris Matthews's TravelRight walks around Aspley, Bilborough, the Broxtowe and Strelley estates (both in the city — not the Borough of Broxtowe). No person in Nottingham is better qualified than Chris to have written this history, and with Dan backing him, the result is an exceptional local history, for that is what it is — local history.

Homes and Places offers a great focus for further research and, perhaps, the creation of a local history group devoted to promoting the Nottingham's great garden city heritage (which I hope will cover the conurbation, as Beeston Fields, where I live, is very much in the Nottingham style in terms of layout and architecture).

Council housing needs its champions and in Chris and Dan Nottingham has two champions it can be proud of. You have to believe to write local history like Homes and Places.

In a couple of weeks I will read it again and see what sticks in my head when read a second time.

Truly wonderful stuff which swells the heart and puffs out the chest.

I plan to write a longer post about the book and council housing sometime in the next few weeks. Right now I simply want to draw attention to Homes and Places. At £9.99 from Five leaves Bookshop in the city centre, it is a bargain, worth its weight in gold. 

Five Leaves is the best bookshop we have in the conurbation and it deserves our support. To access the bookshop at 14A Long Row, opposite the City Centre Tourist Information Office, you need to walk down the narrow passage leading to the Coral betting shop (there is a sign pointing the way to Five Leaves, but smokers can block it from view). I will also do a post about Five Leave, so watch this space...

A FOOTNOTE.

From the back of our Lenton home on Devonshire Promenade, where we lived for thirty-five years, until we moved to Beeston last November, you could see the New Lenton high-rise flats. The photograph below is from 2008 and I have never used it before. It does not do Lenton's five high-rise tower blocks justice, for they were coloured pink by the setting sun, but you can glimpse every tower and I have to admit to being sad that four have been demolished, with the final tower (Newgate Court) about to go. I understand why. I believe they were a great achievement and were loved by many until their very end. Other high-rise flats were not so lucky and with good reason.

Susan grew up in a council house in Tipton, in the heart of the Black Country, and my parents lived in a council flat in Eastbourne until they died a few years ago. My aunt and uncle in Harlow, both Labour Party councillors, never bought their council house because they opposed the sale of council houses, so I am sure you can understand why I welcome Homes and Places with a passion, added to which we now lived in a former Beeston Fields council house.